Mock cream and manual training

The filling in these light, crisp biscuits always bring back a raft of recollections from a time that has quietly slipped into history.

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I don't make mock cream very often these days but years ago it was considered to be an essential skill.

When fresh cream wasn't available, a sponge or butterfly cakes had to be filled with something. But somehow it was more than that. Mock cream sums up an era when domestic skills were drilled into girls (those of us who are 60-something) and the running of a home was an inevitability. The glass ceiling hadn't been conceived of and working women gave up their jobs and careers when they married.

On reflection this was hardly surprising. Appliances as we know them today did not exist, apart from the vacuum cleaner and washing machine (an electric cake mixer in some lucky homes); hence a wife or housekeeper was a very busy person. Mock cream notwithstanding, I learned a lot from my two years of manual training. Come rain or shine we trundled along to Forth St, clutching baskets lined with tea towels to face our instructor, Miss Finlayson. I wonder how many Southland women remember her?

She could be quite ferocious but there was a kind, caring side to her and, more to the point, she knew her stuff. This twig of a woman impressed on us the importance of keeping a tidy working surface (that didn't stick) and how to make very good Cornish pasties.

Coming from an immigrant family, I was inducted into the culinary mysteries of my adopted home, and in a roundabout way it benefited my mother, who was intrigued by the way things were done "out here".

Such is the stuff of memories, with no mention of oyster sauce, tomato paste, or cardamom pods. How did we survive?